Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.
So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
- Title: Everything I Never Told You
- Author: Celeste Ng
- Publisher: Penguin Press
- Publication Date: 2014
- Genre: Literary
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: death, death by drowning, emotional abuse, sexism, sexual assault (briefly mentioned), hitting & punching, and racism, infidelity
- Rating: ★★★★★
I’ve been trying to do a better job of catching up on my physical TBR, and believe me when I say that I’ve been meaning to read Everything I Never Told You for years — to the point where it’s been with me through at least three different moves. I finally sat down and read Everything I Never Told You, and all I have to say is that I wish I’d read it sooner, and that this is one of those books that will haunt me forever. Set in Ohio, Everything I Never Told You follows a mixed-race Chinese-American family in 1977 after their middle child, Lydia Lee, is reported missing. When her body is found, her parents, James and Marilyn, as well as her siblings, Nathan and Hannah, come to realize that they didn’t actually know much about Lydia. Instead of being a perfect student, with a close, tight-knit group of friends, Lydia was actually struggling severely in school, and was incredibly lonely.
Everything I Never Told You is, simply put, gut wrenching. Celeste Ng is a brilliant writer; crafting a complex web of secrets in this small town. Each character is so well developed, and three-dimensional. Everything you could want in a novel is jam-packed into its 297 pages; secrets, a mysterious death, an exploration of family trauma, grief, guilt, love, misogyny, racism, queerness — but not once does it feel overdone, or done carelessly. At its very core, Everything I Never Told You is a story about family dynamics, and how our parents’ expectations, experiences, and dreams — although well-intentioned — are passed on in different ways.
“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers…Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.”
Switching seamlessly between the past, and present, Ng lays the groundwork for how the older generation — James, as the only Chinese student in his school, in his town, and Marilyn, a white woman who gave up her dreams of becoming a doctor to raise their children — seeps into the lives of Nathan, Lydia and Hannah. James’ isolation and loneliness in his youth manifests into Lydia’s need to lie to her parents about her social life in a way to appease them. Lydia’s fear of disappointing her mother — and worse, abandonment — is why Lydia dedicates hours upon hours studying for courses she doesn’t understand. Lydia is undoubtedly the favorite child; resulting in Hannah’s invisibility and desire to simply be loved, and an unspoken competition between Lydia and Nathan. There’s a lot in Everything I Never Told You that fascinated me, but something I keep going back to is how each member of the family felt invisible and how that manifested in different ways.
There’s so much more I want to say about this book, and about the intricacies and brilliance that Ng has woven into this world, but I’ll cut myself off here for fear of spoilers. Everything I Never Told You is more character driven than plot driven, and so some readers may struggle with it, but I personally loved it. I’m sure this is a book I’ll reread again and again in the future, and even if I don’t, it’ll be one that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
Links for Everything I Never Told You: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop.org
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.
Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the screen.
Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon’s Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.
Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, was published in October 2022 in the US, Canada, and the UK, and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
